Every project, regardless of its size or complexity must have a project plan to succeed. As part of that project plan, you need a comprehensive and manageable project schedule. Planning and scheduling your project in a systematic and logical fashion is paramount to the success of the overall program. This hands-on training course, developed and produced by Edwards Project Solutions and taught by project managers will present you with a clear, comprehensive, step-by-step methodology for setting up, entering, baselining, managing, tracking and analyzing the project schedule using Microsoft® Project 2003. Through this course, our experienced project managers will present you with a detailed project management process for scheduling and tracking tasks and resources as well as tracking financial and project metrics using Microsoft® Project 2003.

Section 1: Introduction and Overview. This section, based on PMI® principles and doctrine, provides an introduction to project scheduling and techniques that are utilized to create a comprehensive and manageable project schedule. A history and types of schedules (Gantt, Network, etc.) used in industry will be discussed, along with the typical applications and the positive and negative aspects in using each type of schedule. This section also provides an introduction and overview to the Edwards Project Solutions BMPP method for developing comprehensive work plan, defining and estimating task and milestones and determining the interdependencies and constraints of the tasks.

Section 2: Properties and Options. This section begins the use of Microsoft® Project. The MS Project property and option settings are discussed in detail. Each property and option is defined with an explanation of how MS Project reacts to the setting of the property or option. This section provides recommendations for the setting of each property and option.

Section 3: Templates and Calendars. This section defines the templates and calendars available in Project and provides insight on how and when to use these features. The uses of global and local templates are reviewed with discussions on defining and applying them. Custom scheduling templates, developed by Edwards Industries to support our PMI-based methodology, are presented and discussed. These templates, which are provided on media (floppy or CD) to each student taking the course, have been developed by Edwards Project Solutions over many years of managing projects using MS Project to present schedule and status data to customers and senior management. Calendars are also discussed in this section of the course. The instructor demonstrates how to define, apply and maintain project "master" calendars, resource calendars, task calendars and special purpose calendars. A complete explanation of each type of calendar and recommendations on which types to use under different scheduling scenarios is provided.

Section 4: Setting up a New Project. In this section, a sample project will be introduced to the students. The students will begin to exercise the Edwards Project Solutions methodology for using Microsoft Project. The students, working at their workstations, will follow along with the instructor and translate the information resulting from a planning session for our sample project into an MS Project schedule. The students will learn to begin to establish the schedule in MS Project by entering the properties and general project information into MS Project. Next the students will learn to define the resource pool in MS Project including defining the financial information and resources calendar information, including resource rates, rate increases, company holidays and shift work.

Section 5: Entering Project Data. While still following the methodology and following the lead of the instructor, the students will enter the tasks and milestones, including Level of Effort (LOE) tasks, for our sample project; the students will define the tasks, the task interdependencies and constraints in MS Project. In this section, the instructor will lead the students through assigning resources from the resource pool to the tasks and entering the "work" required to complete each task. Once the project task data and assignment data for our sample project is entered, the instructor will conduct discussions on how to read and understand the critical path and slack time (lag time) of the project. This is followed by an exercise on "resource leveling" to ensure that no resource is working more than their planned availability during the project. The section concludes with setting the baseline on the exercise project and a discussion of the tools that can assist in communicating the schedule.

Section 6: Tracking Project Progress. Now that the students have completed building and base lining the schedule for our sample project, ...THE SAMPLE PROJECT IS READY TO BEGIN... In this section, the students will learn to record the actual progress of project tasks and actual work schedule for project resources. Resource status information for our sample project, which is not executing according to plan, is presented to the class. The students use the status information to follow along with the instructor and record the task and resource status into MS Project. This section provides step-by-step instructions for recording the Actual Start, Percent Completion, and the Actual Work performed for the tasks of our sample project and also for recording sick and vacation time for project resources. Once the entry process is completed, the students will learn to examine the resource and task expenditures using the "Usage" views. The student will learn techniques for adjusting the resource leveling based on the actual progress that is entered and applying adjustments to project LOE tasks.

Section 7: Analyzing Project Progress. Now that the students have built a schedule and recorded status for a schedule, this section provides tools and techniques that can be utilized to analyze the status of the project. This analysis will be performed using (a) standard and custom views such as the various "Usage" views and the Project Statistics screen; (b) Using custom fields to calculate additional project metrics and linking the calculated data to graphical indicators to create "Stop-Light" charts; (c) Macros and procedures to extract static and time-phased data from MS Project for viewing, using or manipulating in MS Excel. Several examples and reports will be generated for the project schedule developed in sections 4, 5 and 6.

Section 8: Project Reports. An overview of the various "canned" reports available in MS Project will be discussed and demonstrated in this section. The custom report generator will also be discussed.

Section 9: Class Exercise. Now that the class has completed the entire process with the instructor, it is time to try it on their own. Section 9, allows each student to use the principles from the previous sections to build a schedule on their own with individual oversight and guidance from the instructors. Each student, working independently, will use MS Project and the step-by-step methodology to set up, create, baseline and communicate this new project schedule. Once the student has completed creating the schedule, the project status information for the third week into the project is provided. Using this status information, each student will update his/her schedule with the status and analyze the results.

Section 10: Supplemental Information on Microsoft Project. In this final section of the course, the class will review some of the lessons learned from the 2-days of training. The instructor will share with the class some of the nuances and anomalies in MS Project and how to avoid or work around them. Finally the course will discuss some of the additional benefits and features available in the next release Microsoft Project.